40 horrors of the past eight years. It must strike you as strange-as strange as it strikes me-that eight years have passed already. I remember a few days after hearing you were missing and a boy was found dead in the room the two of you had been shar- ing, I remember walking down toward the lake to be alone, because I felt myself com- ing apart: the mask I'd been wearing, as much for myself as for the benefit of other people, was beginning to splinter. I could hear ice cracking, great rents and seams breaking my face into pieces, carrying away chunks of numb flesh. I found my- self on my knees, praYIng to a tree. In the middle of some absurdly compelling ritual that I'd forgotten I carried the memory ot Yet there I was on my knees, digging my fingers into the loose soil, grabbing up handfuls, sinking my face into the clawed earth as if it might heal me. Speaking to the roots of a pine tree as if its shaft might carry my message up to the sky, send it on Its way to wherever I thought my anguish should be addressed. I was praying to join you. Offering my- self in exchange for you. Take me. Take me. Free my son from the terrible things happening to him. Take me in his place. Let them happen to me. I was afraid you were dying or already dead or suffering unspeakable tortures at the hands of a de- mon kidnapper The tears I'd held back were flowing finally, a flood that brought none of the relief I must have believed that hoarding them would earn me when I let go at last. Just wetness burning, clouding my eyes. I couldn't will the spirit out of my body into the high branches of that tree What felt familiar, felt like prayers beside my bed as a child, or church people moan- ing in the amen corner, or my mother weeping and whispering hold on, hold on to herself as she rocks side to side and mourns, or some naked priest chanting and climbing toward the light on a bloody ladder inside hIs chest-these memories of what might have been visions of holi- ness could not change the simple facts. I was a man who had most likely lost his son, and hugging trees and burying his face in dirt and crying for help till breath slunk out of his body wouldn't change a thing. A desperate, private moment, one of thousands J could force myself to dredge up if I believed it might serve some pur- pose. I share that one example with you to say that the eight years have not passed quickly. The years are countless moments, many as intense as this one I'm describing to you, moments I conceal from myself as I've hidden them from other people. Other moments, also countless, when ter- rible things had to be shared, spoken aloud, in phone calls with lawyers, depo- sitions, interviews, conferences, in the endless conversations with your mother. Literally endless, because often the other business of our lives would seem merely a digression from the dialogue with you, about you. A love story finally, love of you, your brother and sister, since no word ex- cept love makes sense of the ever-present narrative our days unfold. o o CAr 5 (ßfE1!5J '1t was so depresszng. When I go to the theatre, I want to be entertained" THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST I, 1994 Time can drag like a long string, stud- ded and barbed, through a fresh wound, so it hasn't gone quickly. The moment-to- moment, day-by-day struggles imprint my flesh. But the eight years are also a miracle, a blink of the eye through which J watch myself wending my way from there to here. In this vast house of our fa- thers and mothers. Y OUR mother didn't need my words or images to work out her griet She needed time. Took the time she needed to slowly, gradually, painstakingly unravel feelings knotted in what seemed for a while a hopeless tangle. No choice, really. She's who she is. Can give nothing less than her whole heart to you, to this place, inseparable from all our lives, that her fa- ther, your grandfather, provided. For a while, I guess it must have felt impossible. And still can, I know. She may have doubted her strength, her capac- ity to give enough, give everything, be- cause everything seemed to be tearing her apart, breaking her down. She needed time. Not healing time, exactly, since cer- tain wounds never heal, but time to change and more time to learn to believe, to understand she could go on, was going on, for better or worse. She could be someone she'd never dreamed she could be. Her heart strong, whole, even as it cracks and each bit demands everything. T HE fullness of time. The fullness of time. That phrase has haunted me since I first heard it or read it, though I don't know when or how the words en- tered my awareness, because they seem to have always been there, like certain melo- dies, for instance, or visual harmonies of line in your mother's body that I won- dered how I'd ever lived without the first time I encountered them, although an- other recognition clicked in almost simul- taneously, reminding me that I'd been waiting for those particular notes, those lines, a very long time. They'd been form- 1ng me before I formed my first impres- sions of them. The fullness of time. Neither forward nor backward. A space capacious enough to contain your coming into and going out of the world, your consciousness of these events, the wrap of oblivion bedding them. A life, the passage of a life: the tru- est understanding, measure, experience of time's fullness. So many lives, and each different, each unknowable, no matter